


How to Move in Silence

by Portrait_of_a_Fool



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angst, Disability, Established Relationship, Futurefic, Language, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-02
Updated: 2011-02-02
Packaged: 2017-10-15 07:30:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/158494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Portrait_of_a_Fool/pseuds/Portrait_of_a_Fool
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No matter what he may think, Steve isn't alone in this and he's not the burden he thinks he's become. He just needs to be convinced of that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Move in Silence

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for a bid on me at [Help Brazil 2011](http://community.livejournal.com/helpbrazil2011/). This fic is set somewhere in the future, but not too far ahead. I'd say about two or three years after where we are currently in S1. Apparently I am on a roll with futurefics lately, but the more I wrote on this, the more I realized they'd been together longer than a few months. So. Yes. Futurefic it is. Whopping big thanks to my girl, [Mistress Shiny](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mistress_shiny/pseuds/mistress_shiny) for holding my hand and helping me out with this a lot since it was threatening to completely do my head in.

  
_“My darling, the wind falls in like stones_  
from the white hearted water and when we touch  
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.  
Men kill for this or for as much.”  


— Anne Sexton  
“The Truth the Dead Know”

Steve lays stretched out on his bed and stares up at the white ceiling. The fan whirls, spinning down cool currents of air like invisible threads of spider-silk. He blinks and behind his closed lids, the inverted image of the blades twirl on. It’s nearing dusk and he’s been here since sometime after noon. He ate lunch and then… then he ran out of things do to, so he came back to his bed and its comforting nest of rumpled sheets because he had nowhere else to go.

His ears ache, more a phantom pain now than anything real. It’s been three months since the accident and he thinks maybe the hurt is akin to what people think they feel when they’ve lost a limb. Amputated arms can’t be all that different than a destroyed sense, can they? He wonders and wonders, but can never dream up an answer that’s even remotely satisfactory. After all, he doesn’t imagine he can hear things anymore.

With a sigh, he blinks again and just keeps his eyes closed. In the solid quiet, he watches the sky light up all over again and feels the shockwave of the blast hit him. He remembers sailing through the air and everything was quiet, quiet, _shh_ as he went. The last things Steve ever heard were the sounds of bullets going off in the heat of the flames that ate away the warehouse they’d been illegally stashed in. Then there was a great boom, like the sound of God laughing, a quick, percussive cough of noise—the kind of laugh that gets cut off because it’s inappropriate. He also remembers Danny yelling for him to, _Hurry up, Steve! Come on, you can do it!_

Except no, Danny had been wrong and Steve couldn’t do it after all. He’d stumbled on a piece of debris and that couple of seconds it took to reassert his equilibrium had proved his undoing. Always the last one out, trying to catch the bad guys even at immense cost to himself, that’s Steve-fucking-McGarrett in a nutshell. It’s funny though, in all of his doings, Steve never once imagined he would sacrifice something so great as this. On his worst days, he thinks death would have been preferable than this overbearing silence he’s left with. The sky had been dark and the fire had been bright as he’d run towards the others. It had stayed that way, too, a million stars mocking him as he’d been tossed willy-nilly from the explosion.

As he’d sailed along, wondering how to get off that ride, God had stopped laughing and pressed the mute button on Steve’s pocket of reality and left it that way. All he’d been left with was pain so sharp it hummed through his head and right down into his jaws. Tiny bones had broken, little membranes of skin had ruptured and fine, fine short hairs had lain down under the onslaught. Nothing came back from the wreckage. Some things had been reparable, but putting them back together hadn’t meant they’d _work_ again and they hadn’t. Too much damage, too many hurt things inside his ears and not a miracle worker in sight to make it better in the end.

Just thinking about it makes Steve want to scream or sit down and beg or maybe just throw up because sometimes, yes, he feels _sick_ with it; this grieving for his lost sense. He’s tried to move on and tried to deal with it and sometimes he does just fine. Other times, he does not. The frustration is so overwhelming sometimes, watching peoples’ mouths move, but not hearing the sounds or being able to make out all the words. He misses music and even talking on the phone. If he could have his hearing back, he thinks he would watch anything he could on television, even some of the stupid reality shit that’s on so much now. He has captions on his television, but it isn’t the same and Steve hasn’t learned how to read _and_ watch at the same time.

The night before had been one of those _other times_ and he’d lost his cool outer composure. He’d yelled horrible things at his friends and made them leave. His throat still hurts because he’d ranted and railed at _everything_ long after they’d gone. Even Danny, who’s been with him since this started—and well before that, too—had left. Steve had been drunk and he’d only gotten drunker as the night drew on. He destroyed his living room and broke plates and glasses, all in some stupor-induced effort to try and make some sound he could _hear_. His throat had burned and his fingers had bled from splinters of shattered glass, but Steve had never heard a sound—not his screams or hisses of pain as he’d sat on the closed toilet lid and yanked the glass from his palms.

Now, today, all he’s got to show for it is gauze wrapped hands, a sore throat and a crushing sense of guilty shame for behaving like he had. He closes his eyes again and tries to will it all away. A shift in the air currents slipping through the room has him opening his eyes again a few moments later. He’s grown shockingly good at recognizing shifts in things like the movement of air around him since he’s lost his hearing and the faint sucking feeling of the air drawing over and down his body tells him the bedroom door has been opened.

When he picks his head up to look, he sees Danny standing there, silhouetted in the dying light filtering down the hallway. He holds up a coffee and raises an eyebrow at Steve. Steve motions for him to come on in and breathes a small sigh of relief. When Danny left last night, he hadn’t thought he’d come back; he’d thought the last outburst had been the _final_ outburst for Danny. He can’t expect him to remain steadfast, but much as he tries to pretend otherwise, these days he leans on Danny more than he ever did before. After a while, he realized he needed him in a way he wasn’t used to needing anyone, but now it’s different.

It has become something new, something more visceral and he looks to Danny to hear the things he would otherwise miss and to translate them for Steve in a language he understands. They don’t use sign language because Steve’s been putting it off, stubbornly thinking one day his hearing will magically return to him. They instead rely on their own code of hand gestures, head tilts and hastily scribbled notes in a shorthand language of their own; done via text messages or crumpled receipts. Steve gets it though and only Danny can translate for him so well. Then there are just _looks_ and those are Steve’s favorites, they were a mode of communication they’d developed long before he went deaf.

Danny places his coffee on the nightstand, sits down by Steve’s hip and looks at the nearly empty vodka bottle standing there like a silent testament to the hell Steve raised the night before. He makes no comment and there is no judgment in his eyes when he looks at Steve again.

 _You okay?_ his hand on Steve’s jaw says. It’s warm and comforting, thumb stroking slowly along the sharp bone there and Steve leans lightly into the touch.

Steve could lie and tell him he’s fine, but Danny would know it was a lie, too. “No,” he says in his new voice—whispery soft and faint now that he can’t hear himself. He’s gone from yelling almost everything in an attempt to get some kind of aural feedback to a bare murmur of a voice.

“Figured,” Danny says, speaking slowly and clearly so Steve can read his lips. “That was one evermore fit you had last night.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says and closes his eyes, not wanting to see what Danny may say to that. He hates hiding like this, behind the darkness of his eyelids, but his blow ups have been spectacularly embarrassing, each one of them and there have been a few since his injury.

A sharp thump on the bridge of his nose has Steve’s eyes snapping open once again and he glares at Danny. “Don’t do that,” Danny says and Steve only narrows his eyes more. “Yeah, that doesn’t work on me.”

Steve has nothing to say to any of that, but he relaxes his features and doesn’t make Danny stop when he runs his fingers through his hair, careful not to touch Steve’s ears because he’s gotten _weird_ about them. He watches Danny back in the growing gloom; just enough light left out for him to read Danny’s lips, but it won’t be for much longer and he kind of hopes if Danny has anything else to say, he’ll go ahead. Steve doesn’t want the light on for some reason and he doesn’t care about the whys and what-fors of it at the moment either.

“You can’t keep hiding,” Danny says and Steve huffs, tries to turn his head away. Danny holds onto his chin and Steve stops trying. He knows Danny and knows he can’t get away from him once he’s made up his mind to say his piece unless he knocks him out or shoots him—neither of which Steve wants to do.

“I’m not hiding,” Steve says and fights the urge to wall his eyes away from Danny’s intent face.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Danny says and Steve doesn’t need to hear him to get the sarcasm. It’s all over Danny’s face, right down to the slight twitch at the left corner of his mouth. He can read Danny so well it kind of amazes him sometimes. Danny is open to him in ways everyone else isn’t. “You need to deal with it, Steven, because your hearing is never going to come back.”

“I _know_ that,” Steve says and does try to turn away from Danny then.

“No,” Danny says and moves in that wonderfully quick, agile way he can sometimes that always impresses Steve a little bit.

Danny’s like a spring uncoiling when he does it, so laid back and almost lazy in his movements one moment and _bam_ , a liquid streak of uncoiling muscle and tendon. Danny straddles him, framing his face in his hands and leaning down so close his face is almost a blur. He keeps just enough space between them for Steve be able to read his lips and not much else.

“Look at me,” Danny says, breath ghosting over Steve’s lips. He can smell coffee, fresh still, on Danny’s breath and licks his lips unconsciously at the flavor. “ _Listen_ to me.”

Steve scoffs at that and Danny shakes him gently, jostling his face cradled against his palms. His face fills up Steve’s line of sight; everywhere he looks there Danny is right in front of him; around him. Such a huge presence in Steve’s life that he’s there even when he isn’t.

“I’m… listening,” Steve says with a twist to his mouth, but Danny ignores it and just nods.

“Good,” he says. “This does not have to define you; this is not who you are now.”

Steve shakes his head, cheeks moving against Danny’s hands, stubble rasping against the skin there. He can feel the bristly hairs moving, but can’t hear the sound though he can remember it well enough that it almost suffices. “I can’t be who I was or who I wanted to be,” he says after a couple of minutes, Danny watching him and Steve watching him right back; refusing to look away or close his eyes against the weight of those words.

Danny’s hands soften their grip on his cheeks and he runs the tips of his fingers over Steve’s face, caressing. The ball of his right thumb strokes over his bottom lip as the index finger on his other hand traces the arch of one of Steve’s eyebrows.

“What—who—did you want to be?” he asks and his lips are moving just enough for Steve to follow his words. Danny’s speaking softly and he remembers that voice, too, with an ache that resonates somewhere in his center, making him swallow hard at the ghost of that soothingly gentle voice.

“I wanted this… I wanted to be… _us_ ,” Steve says and allows himself to close his eyes briefly after that because it was hard and tore at something inside of him.

Reaching out with his eyes still closed, he finds Danny’s mouth by memory alone. It’s a little to the left at first, but he rights the error and kisses Danny slowly. It’s a kiss filled with regrets and goodbyes and Steve makes a soft sound in the back of his throat as he curls his injured hands around Danny’s shoulders, holding on as hard as he’s trying to push him away.

“I’m sorry,” he says and lets his hands trail down Danny’s back to fall away onto the mattress again. “I’ll get out of the house tomorrow and you can come pick up your things if you want to while I’m out.”

Danny was going to leave him eventually, he’s certain of it and after last night, he’s even _more_ sure of that fact. Seeing him driving away with Kono to crash with her after they’ve lived together for more than a year was a knife in the heart to Steve. He’d seen the day coming since he’d woken up; reborn into a world without sound, but to have it laid out so picture-perfect had hurt more than he could’ve imagined and he has imagined it in great detail since that awful day in the hospital. He knows in the most hollowed out sense that _this_ has been about Danny coming to say goodbye, he’s sorry, but he just can’t deal with Steve anymore. The only really surprising thing to Steve is that it hasn’t come sooner.

Danny gapes at him until Steve starts to feel uncomfortable. Why doesn’t he _say_ something? _Do_ something? It’s ironic, but his silence; his _stillness_ , is killing Steve.

“Are you out of your goddamned mind?” Danny asks him finally, letting go of Steve’s face so he can wave his hands around, stirring the air and then it’s Steve’s turn to gape. “Yes, you, are you insane? That’s an honest question I’m asking you here. You think I’m _leaving_ you? Or wait—are you dumping me?”

“I’m not… no,” Steve says.

“Not what, insane or dumping me?” Danny asks and cocks his head, eyes boring into Steve’s.

“Neither?” Steve hazards and Danny shakes his head. “I’m not “dumping” you.”

“At least you admit you’re insane,” Danny says after a moment. “So you think I came here to what… say goodbye; just pack my shit and go?”

“Yeah,” Steve says slowly and lets out a shuddery breath when Danny’s hands come back to his face, now stroking the dark patches of skin under his eyes. Mumbling more than he already does, voice so soft and low that Danny has to strain his ears to catch the words, Steve says, “You can’t have Grace in the house with me like this, not if I’m going to be this… unstable.”

The word leaves a nasty taste in his mouth, but it’s the only one that fits and Steve cannot stand the idea of Grace seeing him on one of the nights he binge-drinks and works himself into a rage. So far he has never done it when she’s over, but what if one day he can’t control himself? Then what? Danny would kill him for one thing and for another, Steve would hate himself for scaring that little girl so much.

“You won’t do that,” Danny says and lets his hands run down the sides of Steve’s neck. “You wouldn’t _ever_ do something like that. I think you know it, too.”

The thing is, Steve really doesn’t know that at all and the thought scares him. He pulls himself together and looks at Danny. Danny can see the sorrow and worry, how lost Steve feels—has felt for months now—in his eyes and Steve can tell it. “I can’t keep doing this to _you_ , Danny.”

“Don’t you do this,” Danny says, hands finding Steve’s shoulders and holding on tight, tight. “Don’t push me away like this. I won’t let you do this, damnit.”

Steve almost loses the last part of what Danny says because he’s talking faster, lower, lips moving just shy of unreadable. They would be unreadable if Steve wasn’t paying such close attention to him. He’s rushing, panicking and Steve can feel the way he’s breathing harder because he’s half-sitting on him the way he is.

“ _Don’t_ ,” Danny says and then leans down and kisses Steve again, harder, desperate and biting. Steve gasps and kisses him back, feeling like he’s drowning or maybe breathing again for the first time, he doesn’t know. But it feels good and terrifying, it feels like hope when he thought there was none left for them because of his disability.

When they pull apart to catch their breath, Danny says, “I still want you, just the way you are. Forever. Do you understand that?”

“You don’t mean that,” Steve says, still not quite willing to believe it; to set himself up for the fall he’s managed to convince himself isn’t a matter of “if”, but a matter of “when”.

“Don’t tell me what I think,” Danny says and then presses kisses along Steve’s jaw and up his cheek to his temple, like he thinks he will kiss Steve into believing him even if his silent words can’t do it.

“Danny…” Steve says, his surety cracking under the onslaught of what Danny’s saying and everything he’s doing to punctuate those statements.

“Do you still want me?” Danny asks and looks him dead in the eye. The light is failing fast and Steve’s straining his eyes to see his mouth now. Unlike a few moments before, he doesn’t want the light to end. He needs to, not hear, but _read_ this.

“Yes, God, yes,” Steve says and lets himself wrap his arms around Danny’s back again because that’s where he wants them to be, not on the cold mattress. “That’s not even… not what I meant… Why would you tie yourself down to me like this?”

He feels Danny’s laugh hum against his forearms just before Danny says, “Babe, I tied myself to you long before you were like this and I still love you. You're still the same man you were then; stubborn and insane and _everything_. You are such a jackass for thinking otherwise.”

“You love me?” Steve asks, a smile threatening to crack across his face. He bites his lip to keep from doing it just yet though.

“For fuck's sake, _yes_ ,” Danny says and drops kisses all over his face. It’s normally stuff that Steve would flail about; maybe make some kind of comment about pink dresses and tulips for them both even though he secretly enjoyed it. Right now though, he lets it go and eats it up, taking every kiss, every gesture like a helping hand to pull him from the dark.

“Huh,” is all he says though even though he’s slowly relaxing back into the mattress, hands clutching and plucking at Danny’s shirt. His voice is soft and wondering because he is still struck by how Danny can still love him like he does.

“‘Huh’, he says, like I just told him the sky is blue. You are a real romantic, you,” Danny says and touches the bow of Steve’s upper lip gently with fingertips that smell like printer ink and icing sugar.

Steve flounders for a moment as something comes loose inside of him and leaves him feeling unbelievably light in a way he never thought he would feel again. Then he leans up, closing the small space between them and kisses Danny again. It’s all the things the first kiss wasn’t. It’s like waking up, it’s unspoken promises and Sunday mornings in bed, it’s warm skin in the darkness. It’s love, it’s right here and it’s _them_ and that’s all they ever really needed.

Danny strokes a hand down Steve’s naked side and he arches under the feathery touch, kissing Danny with even more hunger. He pulls at his back, urging him down more to deepen the kiss and his cut fingers protest the rough treatment, but right now Steve doesn’t care. He can change the bandages later, but right now he’s afraid to let Danny go and he thinks Danny feels the same way.

They sort of melt into one another, coming home to each others skin. Steve moves beneath Danny with soft sounds pulling from his throat as Danny nips at his shoulders and grinds down on him. Even when they move away to strip totally, they touch in between, hands everywhere and incapable of getting _enough_ now that the wall Steve had been erecting between them over the months is tumbling down stone by heavy stone.

When they’re finally nude, Danny moves over him again and catches his mouth in a starving kiss. Steve’s already sweating and fine tremors slip through their muscles as they touch and touch and touch, tasting in between spread, stroking fingers. Teeth drags against skin and their breath catches in their throats. Steve buries his face in the side of Danny’s neck, mouthing the skin there, when he presses a finger into his willing body.

He can feel his own sounds of pleasure vibrating against Danny’s flesh as he strokes inside of him, pulling moans and whimpers from his throat. He can’t hear the sounds, but he can feel them, knows they’re louder than he ever let himself be before he lost his hearing. Being unable to register the sounds as anything more than vibrations in his throat allow him a level of abandon he didn’t think he’d ever find. It’s too dark out for words, but they don’t _need_ words, not now, not like this as they fall together in a way they haven’t in a long time—too long of a time.

Danny fingers him until Steve is rutting shamelessly against his hand, begging and whining. He can feel the flush on his skin, making it burn hot and when Danny finally pushes his cock slowly inside of him, Steve bites his bottom lip and meets his eyes. He’s never done that before and Danny is just a shadow, his eyes black in the dark, but he can see the blue crystal clear in his mind. He knows his pupils are huge and that there are tiny little drops of sweat on Danny’s upper lip and his blonde hair will be darkened at the temples by more sweat.

The thought alone makes Steve whimper and rock back to meet Danny’s thrusts as he rides the pleasure of them being back together and slowly becoming whole again. They move together, more in tune than they have been for months, hell more in tune than they've _ever_ been perhaps and Steve thinks this is his new music; just this and only this.

“I love you,” he pants out, voice rough and cracking around soft cries. “I love you, IloveyouIloveyou…”

He tightens his hold on Danny and then throws his head back, gasping and crying out as his orgasm runs through him, razor sharp and water smooth. He collapses back into the mattress, shaking and trembling through the aftershocks as Danny picks up his pace and he watches his shadowy form moving above him with something like awe. When Danny comes, spilling inside of him, Steve moans and bites his lip as he pulls him down to kiss him and catch his own soft sounds of pleasure in his mouth where he can at least have something of them.

After a few moments, Danny rolls to the side, but he doesn’t go far. He presses right up against Steve, molding himself to his body. Steve shivers at the feel of his warmth beside him where not long ago, he’d been imagining himself spending the rest of his days and nights in this bed alone, passing the hours in maddening silence.

Danny places a hand on his chest and they lay there like that, soaking up this rediscovered sense of contentment. Steve is watching the darker outline of the ceiling fan turning its stupid circles against the faint white sky of the ceiling when he feels Danny’s fingers tapping lightly on his chest. Stop. Start. Stop.

It takes Steve a few seconds to realize that it’s Morse code Danny’s tapping against his chest and when it dawns on him; his face splits into a wide grin. Paying attention now, he feels each word as it is lightly tap-pressed into his skin:

_Love. Always. Idiot._

Steve laughs then, more of those strange knots twisting in his belly and throughout his being coming loose with the thrumming sound in his chest. He feels the answering rumble of Danny’s laughter against his side and turns into him, kissing him to catch the sound in his mouth. Pressing their bodies together, Steve runs his hands down Danny’s back and then up again just between his shoulders where he can feel his heartbeat the strongest. He breaks the kiss and then he begins tapping back a response:

_Likewise. Moron._

That time, Danny catches Steve’s mouth in a kiss, sharing his laughter with him again.

****

The End


End file.
